This. So much this. Impeachment won’t help. The 25th Amendment won’t help. Turning away from politics and hoping for a dramatic ending is unhelpful.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/23/17233952/trump-democracy-decay-decline-coup-war-collapse-impeachment

«The reality is that Trump’s removal or resignation from office, while desirable, would not do much to change the trajectory of America’s political institutions. And the mounting desire for something cataclysmic that could change their trajectory strikes me as dangerous. The best we can do, I fear, is to muddle along and try our best to keep things from getting worse. And the less we accept that, and the more we escape into fantasias of collapse and redemption, the harder making those modest incremental improvements will be.

….

Humans, as the late literary critic Frank Kermode argued in his book The Sense of an Ending, crave narrative structure. “We are surrounded by [chaos], and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers,” he writes. We can’t see the world as a sequence of events, one right after another, with no end or resolution in sight.»

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-arizona-8th-special-election/

«Based on FiveThirtyEight partisan lean, an 8-point Lesko win would be exactly in line with past special-election results that have pointed to a Democratic wave. If, however, Lesko wins by a margin in the teens — thus holding Democratic overperformance to 12 points or fewer — then perhaps special-election results are beginning to come into agreement with the tightening generic ballot polls; maybe Democrats’ position truly is eroding. Or maybe not — it’s just one data point.

The margin may also influence both parties’ thinking about November’s big U.S. Senate race in Arizona, which could be decisive in the battle for control of the upper chamber. Again, this special election will be just one data point, but it will be the first one we have for the Grand Canyon State, which is important because Democratic special-election overperformance has varied widely from state to state. Arizona as a whole has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+7.5, so theoretically, any Tipirneni overperformance of 8 points or more would bode well for Democrats’ chances to flip Sen. Jeff Flake’s open seat.»

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/bernie-sanders-is-quietly-building-a-digital-media-empire.html

Politicians going straight to video. I guess this is going to be the future (or is it already the present?). Their news won’t be unbiased, of course, so, in this brave new world, it becomes even more incumbent on us to be responsible.

I wonder if we’ll ever get around to doing something about this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/29/the-cost-of-slavery-reparations-is-now-within-the-boundaries-of-the-politically-acceptable/

«Indeed, compared with Trump’s tax plans and Sanders’s health-care plan, compensating the descendants of slaves for their ancestors’ forced labor would be a modest expense — especially considering that these estimates for Trump’s and Sanders’s proposals are only for the first 10 years, and the costs would continue to accumulate year after year.»

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/us/politics/democrats-house-midterms-california.html

«They are moving most aggressively in California, where the state’s nonpartisan primaries present a unique hazard: State law requires all candidates to compete in the same preliminary election, with the top two finishers advancing to November. In a crowded field, if Democrats spread their votes across too many candidates, two Republicans could come out on top and advance together to the general election.»

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/comey-says-wed-be-better-off-w-hillary-as-potus-hours-after-punting-on-exact-same-question-from-tapper/

«It begs the question why the former FBI Director would tell Jake Tapper one thing and David Remnick another. Is it the fact that one interview was on television and the other was on radio? Did Comey simply change his mind between both interviews? Or did he knowingly withhold from Tapper how he felt about Hillary Clinton being our president?

Whatever the truth may be, the man who used to be the nation’s top cop should know of all people how suspicious it looks when someone who’s being interrogated changes their story.»

https://weeklysift.com/2018/04/16/can-i-stop-writing-about-paul-ryan-now/

«Ryan’s time will come after the Party of Trump has crashed and burned on its own. Then, he imagines, he can step forward as the savior who will lead the GOP back to sanity. Better yet, the Party will come to him and beg him to become it’s savior, the way it begged him to become Speaker.

For the next few years, the right place for an ambitious Republican to be is off stage, so that’s where Ryan is going.»

Thanks, Sharon Updike, for turning me on to The Weekly Sift.

This explains your cousin.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/20/17109764/deepfake-ai-false-memory-psychology

«Here’s one possible reason these redditors believed in the movie so intensely: the Reddit forum itself. Social media brought together like-minded people. “Any type of corroboration is going to strengthen your memory for something, whether it’s true or not, and your confidence in your memory,” Frenda says. These Shazaam  truthers were all riffing off one another, giving each other subtle suggestions to form a false narrative that exists in their minds.»

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/16/17242748/identity-politics-racial-justice-democratic-party-lilla-traub-trump

«The lesson of the New Deal coalition for liberals today is not that they should turn away from appeals to the identities of particular groups. Instead, liberalism is at its strongest when its advocates understand that justice for each group is essential to achieving justice for all.»